Los Angeles is infamous for its sprawling urban landscape that has prioritized low-density housing, often at the behest of the state’s powerful real estate industry. Despite the known risks of building in fire zones, developers continued to do so with the approval and encouragement of government regulators. But in the wake of the devastating fires in L.A., some are questioning the wisdom of urban sprawl, particularly in California. Today on Lever Time , senior podcast producer Arjun Singh unpack...
Jan 17, 2025•29 min
The Los Angeles fires pose huge questions about the future of life in America: Where is it safe to live? How can you protect yourself from such disasters? Is home insurance even obtainable anymore? And will our society finally respond in a serious way to the climate emergency? In the first of a two-part Lever Time series, David Sirota speaks with New York Times writer David Wallace-Wells, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert, and former California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones about wha...
Jan 10, 2025•56 min
Over the holidays, when President-elect Donald Trump said he would appoint an Indian-American immigrant to serve in the White House, key members of Trump’s base were apoplectic. On X, formerly Twitter, prominent Trump supporters like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer argued the move was antithetical to Trump’s pledge to scale back immigration. That put them at odds with billionaire advisor Elon Musk and other tech executives who are leaning on Trump to embrace the use of H-1B visas, which allow high...
Jan 06, 2025•25 min
Lever Time is taking a break this week, but we'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Today, we wanted to re-air one of our favorite episodes from 2024. -- The National Basketball Association wants you to gamble. Since 2014, the league has championed the legalization of sports betting nationwide, partially due to its own business interests in gambling. But the emergence of online gambling has coincided with a rise in troubling health outcomes like increased rates of depression and substa...
Dec 27, 2024•37 min
When Iron Man hit theaters in 2008, it didn’t just launch the wildly successful Marvel Cinematic Universe — it also, with the Pentagon’s help, became a bombastic symbol of modern military might in the digital age. Now, can the same comic book character be used to critique the military-industrial complex and the War on Terror? When Marvel wanted to make an Iron Man film in the early aughts, executives turned to a longstanding relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon, allowing the Defense D...
Dec 20, 2024•33 min
David Sirota reflects on the shocking murder of United Health CEO Brian Thompson and the surge of public anger it unleashed against America’s broken health insurance system. Why hasn’t this longstanding outrage translated into universal health care — a system every other wealthy nation already has? Tracing decades of broken promises and corporate influence — from the Clinton and Obama administrations to today — Sirota looks at how political corruption has trapped Americans in a system that profi...
Dec 17, 2024•17 min
Amid the shocking assassination of a health insurance executive and an upswell of anger towards the country’s fragile health care safety net, the health insurance industry is suddenly facing a reckoning. Among the best experts to make sense of it all is Wendell Potter. When Wendell Potter left his job as a public relations executive for a health insurance company he was sure of one thing: his former employer was harming people every day. Potter, a former vice president of the insurance giant Cig...
Dec 13, 2024•45 min
President-elect Donald Trump’s penchant for exaggeration has pushed the boundaries of how elected officials communicate with the public. Trump’s conspiracy theories and shock-and-awe approach to campaigning propelled him back into the White House — leaving millions wondering how he was able to pull it off. Recent studies into the science of magic, examining how magicians utilize deception to manipulate their audiences, may provide an answer. Today on Lever Time , Lois Parshley, a senior investig...
Dec 06, 2024•35 min
In a special Lever Time post-election bonus episode, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) details how he was nearly excommunicated from the Democratic Party after he raised early concerns about the party's electability in 2023. The group discusses how Democrats’ culture of blind loyalty to the party elite and extreme deference to wealthy donors leave them hopelessly out of touch with voters — and what can be done to change that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Nov 29, 2024•51 min
Arjun Singh interviews Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney about The Bibi Files , a new documentary he produced that uncovers explosive new police footage from the corruption trial of increasingly besieged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The podcast comes the same week the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu — and the U.S. Senate voted down a measure to block military aid to Netanyahu’s government. The conversation touches on the broader implications of...
Nov 22, 2024•35 min
No matter what, the cryptocurrency industry was going to win the election. After spending hundreds of millions to influence politicians in both parties, the industry defeated some of its fiercest critics and scored bipartisan support, particularly from President-elect Donald Trump, despite crypto’s potential risks for consumers and the financial system. Today on Lever Time , Lever reporter Freddy Brewster discusses crypto’s emergence as a political power broker and what industry insiders are hop...
Nov 15, 2024•50 min
Donald Trump easily won reelection with the help of voters who were once considered bedrocks of the Democratic base. In this election, the former president managed to win over more working-class voters than in his 2016 campaign and made historic inroads with nonwhite voters. Why did this happen — and how can Democrats win them back? Today on Lever Time , senior podcast producer Arjun Singh sits down with political analyst Krystal Ball, host of the show Breaking Points , to discuss why Trump’s au...
Nov 08, 2024•59 min
If elected, former president Donald Trump has promised to implement mass deportations, target journalists, and carry out other unprecedented actions. How could he pull it off? Project 2025, a radical plan to reshape the government under Trump, highlights the key to his sweeping agenda: Schedule F, a policy that would expose federal workers to political interference and give the president broad leeway to govern through fear. Today on Lever Time , senior podcast producer Arjun Singh unpacks this r...
Nov 05, 2024•36 min
A biopic of former president Donald Trump released right before the election seems ripe for box office success. But when screenwriter Gabriel Sherman looked for a distributor for his new film The Apprentice , Trump threatened legal action, and major studios got cold feet. Today on Lever Time , Sherman sits down with David Sirota and Arjun Singh to discuss the battle to release The Apprentice and how Wall Street’s Hollywood takeover is making it more difficult for political films to get made. In ...
Nov 01, 2024•53 min
This is a preview of a bonus episode exclusive for premium subscribers. To become a premium subscriber go here . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 29, 2024•12 min
For decades, major labor unions like the Teamsters have endorsed the Democratic ticket in presidential elections — but not this year. In a surprise move, the Teamsters declined to endorse either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. The development — and Trump’s surprising levels of support from blue-collar and union voters — suggests something’s changing in the world of working-class politics. Today on Lever Time , senior podcast producer Arjun Singh unpacks the cultura...
Oct 25, 2024•44 min
Donald Trump is heading to Aurora, Colorado, on Friday — a city that Trump has repeatedly portrayed as crime-ridden and taken over by Venezuelan gangs, despite the refut ations of city officials and police. Ahead of Trump’s Colorado rally on Friday, David Sirota joined the podcast City Cast Denver to explain why Trump has focused on Aurora and the signal he’s sending with his rally in the Denver suburb. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Oct 11, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Millions in the Southeastern United States recently endured one cataclysm after another. First, Hurricane Helene left chaos and destruction across a trail of states. Then, in Georgia, a catastrophic chemical plant fire released plumes of toxic chlorine gas, forcing thousands to evacuate or shelter in place. Both disasters share a troubling backstory: regulatory failures fueled in part by corporate greed made the crises worse . On Lever Time , senior podcast producer Arjun Singh sits down with re...
Oct 04, 2024•34 min
Vice President Kamala Harris has built a broad coalition that stretches from climate activists to a former oil company CEO, all of them aligned against former President Donald Trump. But if Harris wins in November and Trump’s out of the picture, what happens to this band of strange bedfellows, who frequently find themselves split on core issues like taxation and corporate power? What kind of a mandate will Harris have to lead? And is this arrangement setting her up for a rudderless administratio...
Sep 27, 2024•45 min
In 1971, Lewis Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, penned a memo calling on conservatives and business interests to make the nation’s legal system far more friendly to corporate power. A few years later, a lawyer named Michael Horowitz penned a follow-up memo calling for conservatives to indoctrinate generations of lawyers as the right’s foot soldiers on the ground. Today on Lever Time , senior podcast producer Arjun Singh talks to David Sirota and Jared Jacang Ma...
Sep 20, 2024•53 min
When Kamala Harris first ran for president in 2019, she promised to deliver Medicare for All to the people — but that changed. Early in her campaign, she frequently referred to a 2017 bill she co-sponsored with Sen. Bernie Sanders that would have effectively abolished private health insurance. But when political winds didn’t look good, Harris changed course, and ultimately released her own, very different version of the bill, which sought to bolster and support private insurance companies by exp...
Sep 13, 2024•44 min
In television commercials, at speeches, and on the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris frequently boasts that she stood up to big banks as California's attorney general. But her sloganeering obscures a sometimes-ugly record . Today on Lever Time , Arjun Singh looks back at Harris' early years as a district attorney and then state attorney general to see what they show us about the president she may soon become. When Harris first ran for District Attorney of San Francisco in 2003 — a tim...
Sep 06, 2024•38 min
The Lever ’s David Sirota reports on his adventures at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, sharing his on-the-ground reporting on Democrats’ fear of another Trump presidency and their rhetoric loathing the corporate takeover of politics. Sirota spotlights the tension between the convention’s populist framing and its corporate sponsors footing the bill. Sirota also talked to Democratic senators about whether any of Vice President Kamala Harris’ policy promises can become reality withou...
Aug 23, 2024•48 min
Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascent to presumptive Democratic nominee has upended the presidential contest and energized Democratic voters — but what’s the policy behind the vibes? On Friday, Harris unveiled a series of economic policies, including a proposed federal ban on grocery price gouging and plans to lower prescription drug and housing costs . It was a good step, but one that came after Harris faced pressure and criticism for not having a more robust policy platform. But amid viral tren...
Aug 16, 2024•51 min
For more than a decade, global politics have been rocked by the rise of right-wing nationalist governments. Similar to Donald Trump’s rise in the United States, countries like India, Hungary, Brazil, and Italy have seen the emergence of far-right governments who’ve channeled popular anger into support for nativist and anti-immigrant platforms. It turns out we’re largely to blame for it. Today on Lever Time , Arjun Singh sits down with Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp to discuss his new bo...
Aug 09, 2024•44 min
On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, a move that drew praise from a wide swath of the party, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Sen. Joe Manchin. Though Walz was relatively unknown until recently, his stock within Democratic politics skyrocketed in the last few weeks. As governor, Walz passed legislation Democrats have long championed, including increasing taxes on corporations , providing free breakfast and lunch to all school student...
Aug 07, 2024•46 min
Floods, heat waves, wildfires and other climate extremes are becoming a way of life for millions around the world — and tragically a way of death. After a historic, record-breaking flood in France killed her mother, a daughter wants to hold oil companies criminally responsible for her death, joining seven other plaintiffs in a lawsuit. Today on Lever Time , senior investigative reporter Lois Parshley examines a growing global movement of advocates and legal scholars trying to convince courts tha...
Aug 02, 2024•38 min
As Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee, her party is facing an uphill battle to defeat Donald Trump and his attempt to frame his corporate agenda as populism. In a wide-ranging interview on The Brian Lehrer Show on New York’s largest public radio station, David Sirota discusses his recent essay in The Lever about how Democrats must do a better job making clear the party is serious about fighting for America’s working class. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...
Jul 26, 2024•49 min
With Trump last night becoming the GOP nominee and now having his largest polling lead — and with Biden reportedly on the verge of dropping out — David Sirota, Arjun Singh, and The Atlantic ’s Tyler Austin Harper review what is one of the wildest moments in American political history. The biggest question of all: Will the Democrats decide to lose the election, or will they actually fight to win? It's been an extraordinary three weeks in American politics. Biden's disastrous debate performance br...
Jul 19, 2024•1 hr 19 min
Should he stay or should he go? President Joe Biden’s decision to remain in the presidential race has consequences for hundreds of millions of people — and it has at least one Democratic National Committee member and convention delegate inquiring whether the party can force him off the ticket. But if Biden’s out, corporate lobbyists who’ve embedded themselves into the party could help select the new nominee. Today on Lever Time , Arjun Singh speaks with The American Prospect’s Executive Editor D...
Jul 12, 2024•34 min
